Wolfgang Mann

Residency: Columbia Global Centers Rio

Research: Strengthening Global Networks on Ancient Greek Philosophy

Professor Mann joined the Columbia Philosophy Department in 1992. He is the author of The Discovery of Things: Aristotle’s Categories and Their Context (Princeton, 2000), and he recently co-edited, with James Allen, Eyjólfur Emilsson, and Benjamin Morison, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 40: Essays in Memory of Michael Frede (2011). His research interests include: theories of argumentation (i.e., logic and rhetoric, broadly construed), beginning with Socrates and Plato; the history of central metaphysical contrasts — for example, corporeal/incorporeal, composite/simple, whole/part, matter/form, object/property, potentiality/actuality — throughout antiquity and the middle ages; and within ethics, treatments of the relation between rational and non-rational motivation; and accounts of freedom (for example, those of Epictetus and Plotinus) which do not require that an agent be able to act differently (from how they actually do act) in order to count as free. He has also worked on English and German Romanticism (especially Wordsworth and Hölderlin); the reception of classical antiquity in 19th-century Britain and Germany; and the historiography of philosophy.